Falling Idols (31 page)

“You
can
stay here if you want. I know it’s not as tastefully appointed. But the offer’s there.”

Her refusal was softened by her smile and the bead of sweat at the tip of her nose. “It’s not even on my tab, Austin, now why would I choose splinters over a mattress?”

“Well, it’s purifying,” he said, and they laughed, then spoke for the next hour or more as the sun fell toward the stone spires and anvils in the west. The worst of the heat began to ebb from the day and he figured Memuneh should rouse soon. The first time he turned, impelled by some benign inner alarm, Austin saw him in the square of the front window, watching them in silence. Studying their conversation, maybe even their bodies.

Memuneh was so androgynous as to be a stereotype. Worse, he was familiar. After encountering him in the desert, Austin had combed through books in one of the silly shops that had sprung up like mushrooms last year and found the face he’d recognized: identical to the harpist in a centuries-old painting entitled
Musician Angels
.

Inspiration and artist’s muse? Hardly. As Austin understood, the Kyyth were not by nature corporeal, but when opting otherwise, they engineered bodies from the elements around them. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen … their comprehension of molecular biology was intuitive but staggeringly complex. Yet they had a refined sense of aesthetics. So long as they were shaping bodies, undoubtedly they’d make those shapes pleasing to themselves, and they weren’t too proud to mimic. There was no reason to believe they restricted themselves to human form, either, if others suited their purposes or whims. A Kyyth could theoretically incubate itself into a wolf or a Sequoia; into something extinct, or even otherwise nonexistent.

And then there was Memuneh, with idiosyncrasies all his own. As doe-eyed as if he’d stepped fresh from a Renaissance canvas, with flaxen hair center-parted and shoulder-length, swept to either side of a high, pale forehead. He could weep, Austin knew, but apparently hadn’t wanted his flesh to sweat.

When Austin touched Gabrielle’s wrist, she stopped talking and followed his gaze. Saw the face, expressionless in the window, then he heard her breath catch in her throat.

Memuneh faded from the window. After it became apparent that he wasn’t going to step outside, they followed. He’d retreated all the way across the room, by the iron stove.

“It’s only Gabrielle,” Austin said. “I told you about her.”

They watched each other in mutual apprehension, as if each was afraid to be the first to move.

“I find your name very beautiful,” Memuneh said to her. She actually blushed. “You watched me dreaming. In the other room.”

Gabrielle, looking at the floor now, stammering an apology.

“You fly in your dreams too,” Memuneh went on. “When you do, you never feel that it’s a new talent you’ve only just learned, but a very old ability—”

“That I’ve just remembered,” she whispered, and touched her lips with fingertips.

“Exactly. That’s the genuine you. Why have you brought her here, Austin?”

“Good question,” he said.

There was no doubt that Gabrielle believed him now, the one person in the world whose opinion of him over time truly mattered. He was vindicated. But was this all? Two thousands miles for him to say, “I told you so”? It couldn’t be as petty as that, his pride alone, of no benefit to her.

She was recovering her wits easily enough — Austin could see whatever remained of the journalist inside rising to this rare opportunity — but then Memuneh himself hardly discouraged it. What degree of power a Kyyth might wield Austin didn’t know. Memuneh, though, had elected to look as if one punch would floor him.

Despite what he was, and the unearthly androgynous beauty of his form, Memuneh looked entirely unintimidating. Gabrielle was advancing on him and it appeared to make him uncomfortable. She, a convert all over again, old doubts slipping from her like the scales from Saul’s eyes: I shut my heart to what I knew was true, all these years, oh my god the loss of them, tell me, tell me as much as my ears can bear, tell me what’s true and what’s a lie, tell me why there’s so much pain, tell me the thoughts of God. Tell me.

But Memuneh was backing away from her, sliding first along the wall, and then
up
it, head tucking into his shoulder as his feet left the floor. His arms circled his front, cradling himself as he rose, hair brushing against the ceiling and his legs drawing up, and he stopped. Eyes losing focus, each tracking independently now, like a chameleon’s, whites showing in the center as the mismatched irises rolled to the outside.

He had almost none of the quiet self-surety of the Kyyth from the train tunnel. Memuneh was at times like an autistic child. An angel savant.

His eyes were fibrillating in his head, then his head itself began to tremble. A thread of fragrant fluid, like filtered honey, slipped from the corner of his mouth and to the floor. From deeper in his throat, two notes, one high, the other low, their pitches in wavering flux like the unsure harmonies of wolf pups learning to howl. The sound of it prickled hair and Gabrielle was beside herself for having triggered this.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Austin told her.

From behind them, another sound, the soft rustling of growth. They turned to see green tendrils curling from the symbols he’d marked on the walls, not that he needed them anymore but he felt a nostalgia for the crude gateways they’d once been. From their flaking rust-toned lines surged this unexpected new life. Buds fattened at their ends, then bloomed, a garden of morning glories yawning open, then they too began to sing, in shrill screeching voices that pierced like needles of sound.

Gabrielle had pressed her hands over her ears and Austin was about to follow her lead when the flowers quieted. Memuneh fell silent a moment later, drifting back to the floor and focusing his eyes. He looked at the blooms, already beginning to wilt, wither, fall.

“If you insist on painting your walls,” he said, “there are better mediums than blood. I do
not
like that.”

“My walls, my blood,” Austin said. “Or most of it.”

Memuneh crushed shut his eyes, as if his heart were breaking. “Oh, Austin. How will you ever reach for the future as long as you keep clinging to the past?”

He said he couldn’t be here right now, that he wished to go off somewhere and wait for the stars. A few moments after he was gone, Austin decided anything would be better than facing the look in Gabrielle’s eyes, so he found a rag, and began to clean up the spatters of honeydew and dead blossoms.

*

He’d lost track of her life long before he dropped out of college, but the year after, she was home for a visit and he was home to bury his father, so she came to see it done. Was there any such innocent beast as coincidence? Or was there a process at work here, hidden and cunning? He didn’t think about this until later, caring now only that he could cherish the woman she’d become, and that his skin was clear again.

But it was more than outgrowing the spotty adolescent he’d been. Austin supposed he’d changed enough to seem a new creature entirely, reborn from their shared chrysalis of summer scabs and wonder. New thoughts, new feelings — maybe he was exotic to her now. As children they’d hunted angels, and he still believed, but now he disdained them.

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well,
Rilke had written. A revelation. Court the devils with enough enthusiasm and maybe it would shock the angels from their complacent limbo. Angels were like cats, coming whenever they pleased, and devils like dogs — they eagerly came when called.

Anyone’s twenties are a time of great indestructibility, and the days are fertile, without limit. Austin and Gabrielle moved around a lot because there were so many places to move
to
. Odd jobs when they needed money, slack time when they didn’t. The occasional marijuana transport could keep them flush for months.

Three times, in three different cities, his heart stopped as he overdosed on one drug or another, and after he was resuscitated he would try to remember if he’d seen the tunnel of light that everyone always mentioned. Or his old pal from that other tunnel, the train tunnel, shaking his head with a disapproving sigh and saying, “What did I tell you? Don’t be pushing your luck.”

But no. He got none of this, only a nagging sense of dèjá vu, I’ve done this before, died many many times before, how could I have forgotten all those others…? And then he would wake to the world and Gabrielle’s reddened eyes, and promise her never again.

He couldn’t imagine another woman willing to look inside him for whatever it was that kept her with him. Gabrielle seemed the one pure thing in a wretched world, but maybe that was because she didn’t see the world the same way. If it was true that souls had ages, then hers was one of the young ones; it frisked about like a kitten, driven by curiosity and delight. But his was a weary old tom, waiting out the days in its place in the sun while nursing a disgruntled hunch that something better had passed it by.

People couldn’t live this way forever.

For the past eleven years he’d tried to see it through her eyes instead of his own. Twilight in the Badlands of South Dakota — he’d wanted to go there ever since reading Steinbeck’s impression of that harsh and arid place, knowing by now how artists could be prophets without realizing it, truths they’d never consciously intended seeping into their brush strokes or their words.

They deserve this name. They are like the work of an evil child,
Steinbeck had written of the Badlands.
Such a place the Fallen Angels might have built as a spite to Heaven, dry and sharp, desolate and dangerous, and for me filled with foreboding. A sense comes from it that it does not like or welcome humans.

But the Badlands didn’t drive Austin away, and that was welcome enough. He and Gabrielle rented a cabin on their border and did what they always did whenever they put civilization behind them: divided their attentions between earth and sky.

He’d been gone a full day when she came looking for him on one of the trails they’d explored together. In the years to follow Austin imagined what it must’ve been like for her, picking her way along the runnels of erosion.

She spotted him on the wide, flat top of a rocky outcropping, kneeling and stripped to the waist. He imagined how he must’ve looked to her as she drew nearer and saw first the braided rawhide whip doubled together in his fist, then the mass of bleeding welts draped over each bare shoulder, all the way down his back to his waist.

He imagined her revulsion on seeing the coyote, the condition of its tawny pelt. Surely she understood that it was dead.

A storm had threatened earlier. The evening sky was a dense blue-gray, sawn at by jagged ridges of stone. The wind blew from the northwest and sliced itself apart to get to them.

“They’re coming,” he told her. “You can’t believe how hard they’re trying to get through here.”

And if she understood that the coyote was dead already, he could imagine her grasping for some rational explanation why it would still be moving, but just its throat and lower jaw, like the victim of a stroke trying to form sensible words. All through that night, he never could make out what they were.

But he could imagine how Gabrielle must’ve felt, turning her back on the sight and running for the cabin. He found it empty the next morning, and the van was gone. She’d left a note, at least.

That he didn’t blame her, he regarded as a sign of growth.

Did you ever consider,
she’d written in the note,
that you’ve taken what was a beautiful, inexplicable experience you had as a boy and used it to destroy your life?

Only every day, he told the note.

Only every day.

*

She went back to town after Memuneh’s seizure — he didn’t know what else to call it — and did not return all that next day. Or the day after that. The Kyyth was gone as well, but his disappearances were common enough, and never lengthy.